Chilly, windy day: morning breezes have blown away most of the cloud cover. In an hour, I have to be at the physical therapist’s, meaning I have to leave in 45 minutes. Nothing from my son as to whether he’s picking me up or when. But this poses no problem for the appointment, because the spavined shoulder is healing MUCH faster than I imagined possible, and I certainly can drive my car the couple of miles to get to the PT’s office/clinic/gym/whatever-you-call-it.
I can think of about a thousand things I’d rather do than spend another hour going hup-hup-up, flapping my arms around. WHAT a bore! However….gotta admit that just one session seems to have made a huge difference. The joint hardly hurts at all, and I can move the arm in just about any direction without a startling stab of pain.
Meanwhile, there’s a Safeway catty-corner across the street from the PT’s joint. Some groceries are in order…so whenever I get free from the “therapy” or whatever it is, I can dodge over there and refill the fridge. That’s assuming my son doesn’t show up to haul me over there.
If he does, he’ll need to get back to work ASAP: this business of his taking 90 minutes or two hours off to ferry me around in the middle of the afternoon is NOT satisfactory.
*****
Wasting way too much time reminiscing
about old times and daydreaming about childhood friends.
Few of those were in evidence, back in the Bad Old Days of Saudi Arabian exile. I was a weird little kid: instead of craving to grow up to be a pretty little wife and mommy, instead of spending my endless hours pretending to cook meals on a play stove, I craved to become an astrophysicist.
No kidding. That’s what I wanted, back in the days when girls could barely get into a public college, to say nothing of majoring in science. HAR HAR! I had no idea I would not be allowed to pursue a career in astronomy or physics…I imagined I would grow up, escape the horrid confines of Saudi Arabia, get in to Cal Berkeley (where other members of my family went…members of the male persuasion, by and large), and major in astronomy.
Heeeeee!
Dream on, girlie!
Anyway, because I was too stupid to keep my mouth shut about this line of thought, my little colleagues in school saw me as a hilarious butt of teasing and tormenting. By the sixth grade, I hated school so violently I would dream up just about any excuse to stay home. Consequently, my mother thought of me as sickly…she fell for every tale I’d tell her.
One of her best friends out there, though, was a nurse. This woman was no fool.
Somehow she figured out what was going on, and she recognized that I was just…flat…MISERABLE living in that horrid place. What she did — one of the biggest favors anyone ever did for me during my entire lifetime — was to tell my mother that I needed to come back to the United States and be enrolled in a decent school here. She convinced my mother that the two of them needed to dream up a tale to faze past my father, something that would persuade him to send my mother and me back to the U.S. well before it was time for him to retire and come back to the States.
Don’t know what they did or how they did it, but…they DID do it. I’d already been taken out of the nasty grade school, thereby escaping the second-stupidist primary-school teacher of my life (the stupidest one surfaced in the fourth grade). Now instead of having me tutored privately, my mother managed to get my father to send us home to San Francisco.
There, she enrolled me (by luck and by God, as far as I can tell) in a wonderful school that was part of San Francisco State University’s College of Education.
- The teachers did not treat me like sh!t.
- Indeed, most of the teachers appeared to have inherited their fair share of IQ points.
- The kids did not know I was the weird little kid. They treated me like one of their own.
- Because I had nothing to do in Arabia but study and read, I was far, far, far ahead of my grade level. The sixth-grade teacher they dropped me on must have been astonished.
- And I even made a couple of actual friends, if you can imagine.
****
Back from the Magical Mystical Physical Therapist!
That guy really is good at what he does. As in amazingly good. After an hour of hopping around at that place, the arm hardly hurts at all, and it moves almost as well as it did before I busted it. He listened to what I said MayoDoc said and issued some advice about what to ask and who else to talk with.
At any rate, I gathered we can expect the complete healing process to take about six weeks.
From there it was over to AJs, where as usual I failed to buy all the things we need. Tomorrow I’ll have to traipse back down there.
But…f’r sure…NOT today!
